Kruger Critters

For clarification bunny-chow has nothing to do with rabbits, but is curry served in a hollowed out loaf of bread. No idea where the name came from, but it is a fine idea.

We have spent the last week on safari spotting all sorts of critters across several national parks, most notably Kruger where we spent 5 days and were lucky enough to spot the 'Big 5' (lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and buffalo) all in the one day. Spotting cats in Kruger is very easy - you drive along until you find a traffic jam and then try and see what everyone is looking at. Unfortunately we didn't have the most commanding view from our Yaris, but elephant do look more impressive when you are only 3 feet off the ground! We managed to time our visit to Kruger with a local holiday so it was pretty packed and we weren't able to camp where we had intended - we ended up in the 3 different camp grounds, at almost opposite ends of the park. It took us 10 hours to drive from Crocodile Bridge in the south to Mopani on our second day - but it worked out well as we got to see much more of the park than we otherwise would have. We were also lucky enough to see lions with a kill - chasing vultures around and being generally very selfish... We were also really lucky to see two cheetah next to the road on one of the south African parks game drives we took. They had just been feeding and were in no rush to go anywhere so we got a really good close look at them. We also did an evening drive with spotlights which was pretty cool. I've done a lot of spotlighting, but don't normally come across elephants, serval and other interesting critters including a chameleon. In short, Kruger was fantastic and I would highly recommend it to anyone in this part of the world - it is weird to be able to drive around the (almost Australian) bush in your car and then there is an elephant or giraffe in the middle of the road!

After Kruger we spent two nights in the Blyde River Canyon region. Pretty spectacular with the highveld plateau dropping 1000m down to the lowveld plains. Looks very similar to our sandstone escarpment country in Kakadu, just on a massive scale.

We are currently in the lounge at the Jo'berg airport awaiting our flight to Windhoek in Namibia. We managed to survive Jo'berg without getting mugged, although we were very nearly taken out on the freeway coming into town by some f*$kwit who though it was a good idea to just drive out into a stream of traffic moving at +100km/hr. The south african roads are a very dangerous combination of third world lack of rules with first world quaility roads - meaning the normal traffic chaos of the third world all happens at 150km/hr. The wonder isn't that so many people are killed, but that so many survive!

When we hit Namibia this afternoon we are heading straight to Swakopmund as I am working tomorrow (for one day) and going on a visit of the Rossing Uranium Mine. After that we don't really have a firm plan yet but I guess it is about time we came up with one!